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Gov. Eric Holcomb has proclaimed September as Recovery Month in Indiana in conjunction with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA’s) National Recovery Month. #RecoveryMonth aligns with the governor’s #NextLevelRecovery initiative to combat the drug crisis and is focused on increasing awareness and understanding of mental and substance use disorders and celebrating people who enter recovery.
Indiana ranks seventh worst in the United States and last in the Midwest for infant mortality. Gov. Holcomb has challenged Indiana to achieve the lowest infant mortality rate in the Midwest by 2024. In real numbers affecting real people, that means Indiana needs to be saving the lives of at least 200 babies per year by 2024. On May 8, Governor Holcomb signed House Bill 1007 into law, charging ISDH to “establish a perinatal navigator program for the purposes of engaging pregnant women in early prenatal care and providing referrals to pregnant women for wraparound services and home visiting programs in the local community” (IC 16-35-1-11 Sec. 11).
The goal of this program will be to identify women early in their pregnancies and connect them with an OB navigator – a home visitor who provides personalized guidance and support to a woman during her pregnancy and at least the first 6-12 months of her baby’s life. The focus of the program in the first year will be women who use Medicaid for their insurance and who live in one of 20 high-risk counties. More information is available on our website here. The first step toward launching the OB Navigator program is a series of community meetings across the state. You can be added to a meeting invitation list to learn more about this project in any of the targeted counties. The dates and counties are listed on the website. If you are connected to a program serving moms and babies and would like more information, please email the obnav@isdh.in.gov and let us know what county meeting you would like to attend.
The Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) has received a three-year, $21 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that will bolster the state’s efforts to prevent and detect drug overdoses. The funds will be used to collect better data and apply it to create prevention programs that will further the state’s critical response to the drug epidemic, including: enhancing INSPECT, the state’s prescription drug monitoring program; collecting better, more timely data on overdoses treated in emergency departments; providing harm reduction training to law enforcement; and partnering with the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration to establish linkages to care by providing transportation to treatment centers. These strategies are another step in Indiana’s multiagency, multipronged response to tackle the drug epidemic.
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used data from CDC’s State Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System (SUDORS), which includes Indiana, to make three conclusions about changes in opioid-involved overdoses deaths from the second half of 2017 to the first half of 2018. Overall, they noted an almost 5 percent decrease in opioid deaths, including a decrease in overdose deaths for prescription opioids and illicit synthetic opioids, excluding illicitly manufactured fentanyl (IMF). However, there were more IMF related deaths as two-thirds of opioid deaths involved IMF. Overall, 63 percent of opioid deaths from January 2018 to June 2018 involved at least one common nonopioid drug. This report supports efforts to increase risk-reduction services and evidence-based treatment for persons with polysubstance use or misuse disorders.
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